Earth Spirit Dreaming: Shamanic Ecotherapy Practices - Elizabeth E. Meacham 2020

Vibrational Experience in Western Cultures
Dream-Connecting: Creating New Stories in Vibrational Reality
Dream-Connecting Practices

As the orientation of Western culture is grounded in disconnection, the connection with “all our relations” gives us new information to reach beyond the limits of our current abilities to understand or believe. Moving into contact with elemental nature energies, seeking engagement with spirit helpers and speaking and listening to the Earth, we are directed to see new possibilities. In this new world of participatory reality and belief structures, acknowledging co-creation through dreaming in the vibrational realm is central to engaging healing for the Earth.

In the Cartesian worldview, substance is separate from process, self from other and thought from feeling. A systems perspective, conversely, sees what appear to be separate, “self-existent” entities as mutually constitutive.⁷¹ Joanna Macy, a systems thinker, refers to the image of nerve cells in a neural net to symbolize the nature of information flows. This image is suggestive of an important systems insight: mind is not separate from nature, but rather is ubiquitous in the “circuitry” of the flow of information. This flow takes place at the level of vibrations, both the originator of and background “field” of our shared realities.

In the history of Western thought, there are many attempts to grapple with numinous experience within the limits of truth as ideas in the context of objective reality. Immanuel Kant, in his first Critique, takes pains to emphasize that “Transcendental and transcendent are not interchangeable terms ...” ⁷² Transcendent means beyond the limits of experience, while transcendental means necessary conditions of experience. American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson restates Kant’s view by suggesting that transcendent could mean beyond the usual limits of experience. Emerson’s hope, channeling some of the romantic thinkers who maintained the possibility of knowing beyond reason in the history of Western thought (Goethe, Shelling, Swedenborg, Coleridge, Blake, Hugo), is to encourage others to access revelatory experiences that derive from a profound sympathy with the natural world.

Earthly American philosopher Charles S. Peirce describes his own experiences that exist “beyond reason” as connecting to a higher principle in the universe simply through the act of allowing his mind to open freely for long periods of time. He argues that, given the opportunity, any mind will find its way to oneness with the universe through the mind’s natural capability of accessing these higher spheres. For Emerson, the experience of “beyond” came from these sympathetic experiences in nature as an entrée to the imaginal realms of experience. When the perceptual bridge that created the experience of unity/correspondence could be crossed, other experiences, sensations, sense of time and space, and other beings were encountered.

The visionary nun, Hildegard of Bingen, offered the Western world visions into vibrational reality through numinous experience long before the Enlightenment closed the door on these kinds of truths. As can be found throughout Western thought and traditional religions, the wisdom of the mystics always returns to the fabric of “spirit” underpinning reality; a divine force that is mysterious, always shifting and changing, somehow knowable, but never to be fully understood. Cynthia Overweg, in her article “Hildegard of Bingen: The Nun Who Loved the Earth,” illuminates Hildegard’s understanding of an intimate knowing and love of nature as being the gateway to the underlying matrix of the cosmos:

In Hildegard’s worldview, a beam of sunlight, the fragrance of a flower, or the graceful movement of a swan were all participants in the holy chorus of creation. To be out of sync with the beauty and fecundity of nature is to deny the divine force which enlivens body and soul. She called this force viriditas, using the Latin word for “greenness.”

She envisioned this “greening power” as a force that continually nourishes the earth and all its creatures. For Hildegard, the color green symbolized nature’s vibrancy, ripening, and eternal becoming. She made it clear that we are not separate from nature, but an intimate part of it. When she observed the wonder and splendor of nature, she saw a divine underpinning which sustained not only the earth, but the cosmos. “Creation is the song of God,” she said.⁷³

Nature as a Gateway to the Vibrational Matrix of Life

As we approach the gateway to the vibrational realm — the place of stories, symbols, spirit and “magic” — we can help ourselves across the threshold by soothing our questioning minds with science. To create a story of deep connection, we have to talk our rational minds into why these states of being are possible. Along with systems theory, as used by Laszlo, Macy and other important holistic thinkers, quantum theory is another avenue.

In an interview published in The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes,⁷⁴ David Bohm argues that the challenge for the “individual locus of consciousness” is to provide the condition that allows the universal force to awaken the participatory experience.⁷⁵ In Bohm’s case, this would be a perception of the implicate order — another term for vibrational reality — made manifest through an awakened experience of the explicate world. The result, for Bohm, is not knowledge in a Kantian sense, but direct non-dual awareness. Bohm argues that nondual awareness causes the suspension of Kant’s categories of reason, and of three-dimensional space-time.⁷⁶

In Bohm’s view, this cessation of consciousness as “the knower” then allows the noumenal intelligence to operate directly through the individual. This is another way of understanding the role of the dreamer as co-creator through conscious engagement with noumenal intelligence, the consciousness of the cosmos as expressed in the vibrational matrix that underlies all of life.

In his book, The Visionary Window: A Quantum Physicist’s Guide to Enlightenment, Amit Goswami describes quantum mechanics as a way to understand experiences that seem to abide “beyond reason.”⁷⁷ He suggests that there exists in all of us a quantum self; a part of us that is accessible beyond the limits of what we understand as shared physical reality. He refers to both the experience of quantum reality and the notion of the quantum self: “One spectacular aspect of any quantum mechanics is the possibility of nonlocal correlation — parts of a system that are separated by distance dancing in phase in a coordinated, coherent fashion.”⁷⁸ And later in the book, Goswami continues with the same idea, suggesting that “as we fall into a quantum self we become privy to a nonlocal window of memories — past, present and future.” ⁷⁹

Emerson experienced moments of “transcendent” awareness, or highly sympathetic states that he believed were required for vision, rather than mere observation, to occur. The experience that brought me into contact and knowing of vibrational perception came, as with Emerson, through extensive meditation and reflection in nature. As I watched the world, and the higher consciousness of my “watcher” watched me watching, the edges of “object reality” melted away into something else. As I’ve worked as an energy healer and shamanic practitioner it is my supposition that we can sense, experience and create at the level of vibrational reality, known to physicists as the level of the quanta: a non-local subsystem of reality that spreads across vast distances and time, and is essentially unconceivable and unobservable without taking into account the impact of the observer. Yet again, we find in these moments that we can relate with life beyond the limits of cognition.

Along with philosophers, scientists and thinkers of all kinds in Western thought, psychologists struggle to fit notions of the self and the psyche into objective and “reasonable” terms. Analytic philosopher W.V.O. Quine brilliantly captures the experience of reaching the edges of reality as it can be quantified with concepts in his essay, “Ontological Relativity.”⁸⁰ Quine postulates the image of a flat surface with frayed edges to denote the flat map of Western knowledge of the world. These edges are constantly being rewoven and remade but are always tearing and rupturing as we struggle to stretch with reason and concepts to where we perceive that something exists, but to where the mind alone cannot travel.

Carl G. Jung, who himself grappled to understand his encounters with spirit helpers through his deep immersion into imaginal and symbolic experience, describes experience at the edges of conceptual reality in the reflections and art of The Red Book.⁸¹ Jung felt and perceived the underlying fabric of something larger that human reason, creating a psychological metaphysics of the collective unconscious to express his realization.

Jung’s commitment to working with mandalas both represented and took his awareness beyond the edges of rational experience, where he knew something existed and could be known, but only through non-scientific and nonrational methods. His sensitivities to the underlying matrix of the cosmos eventually led him into a dark night of the soul — a spiritual emergency, emotional breakdown, or a psychotic episode, depending on your orientation — a typical initiation experience of shamanic personalities. Though I had many spiritual emergencies through my teens and twenties, it was hearing trees talking and dreaming of messages from recently deceased family members that began a series of initiations that I only understood in retrospect. I hold these times with profound respect for what they wrought in my soul, forging me into a new vessel of perception through inner and outer fires that I might not choose to live through again. Yet, these are the crucibles that make us seers, spiritually awake and prepared to be with the intensities of life in all her forms.

In The Red Book, Jung works through the deep questioning of his soul, as he slips outside of this world and into others. He keeps a record of his visions and encounters through writing and art work. The Red Book is a journal through Jung’s process of moving beyond reason into the wholly non-rational, even up to and including the “psychotic” and arguably shamanic experience of other beings. This is Jung’s memoir of a shamanic awakening. The release of linear reality into the realms of magic. He identifies early in the book that this is happening to him because he has avoided the depths and longings of his own soul.

Allowing himself to fall fully into the reality of his dreams, Jung digs further into the life of his soul, questioning all assumptions of his own cultural and religious heritage. In his words, considering the essence of God, he dreams of an old man, who he calls a prophet. A black serpent is on the ground before him, and a beautiful blind maiden steps out of a door of a house with columns. He is eventually brought across a threshold into other worlds:⁸²

The old man waves to me and I follow him to the house ... Darkness reigns inside of the house. We are in a high hall with glittering walls. A bright stone the color of water lies in the background. As I look into its reflection, the images of Eve, the tree, and the serpent appear to me. After this I catch sight of Odysseus and his journey on the high seas. Suddenly a door opens on the right, onto a garden full of bright sunshine. We step outside and the old man says to me, “Do you know where you are?” ⁸³